


O Captain! My Captain!

by pompon



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Gen, written pre-release
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-03 00:28:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19452640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pompon/pseuds/pompon
Summary: You do remember Claude. But you remember Dimitri, too.





	O Captain! My Captain!

**Author's Note:**

> Written after realizing I have exactly 25 days to write whatever I want about my children before I am jossed by canon's characterization. Also spurred on by the fear that it is likely my boys won't be able to ~romanse~ each other in-game. IntSys, if you're reading this: give the people what the people deserve.

It is dark when you push open the flap to your king’s tent. Inside, the braziers are lit. The fires flicker like banshees, as though they are just about to leap from their vestigial bronze cups. The tent is three-tiered: the entrance amphitheatre for visitations, which comprises only a single, wooden throne; the room behind the throne, in which Dimitri studies and writes his letters and sees his private audiences; and the final room, which holds, presumably, his bedding. You go straight into the second room.

Dimitri sits behind a desk, dry chocolate, with an attendant standing to the side. His hair falls lank and dull around him, and a cracked bell rings inside your chest for what once was. He’s still clasped into his armour, glinting in the low-light like silver beetle shells. His eye flickers up once, noting your entrance, before falling back to the vellum on which he’s writing.

“Your Majesty,” you begin, crisp, formal. You look at the attendant and then at Dimitri’s bowed head.

He doesn’t say anything at first, which gives you time to formulate the way in which you will deliver your next words. You wait as he finishes the last lines of his letter, and when he’s done he hands the letter to the attendant, who takes it, bows, and leaves. You don’t step aside for the attendant; they move around you. Then it is only the two of you, and you wait, hands at your sides. After a pause you say, “The Golden Deer have agreed to parley at dawn.”

He looks up. Rasps, “There will be no parley.”

You make nothing so gauche as an expression, nor do you say what it is that you are thinking, which is: _I don’t understand_. Your pause you hold for the duration of a sigh, and then you bend at the waist. “Very good, Your Majesty.”

When you look up he’s looking at you too. His eye is a shard of ice, and it runs you through. When you were younger it was — they were — brighter: a starry night over the pink-limned hills of snow, as back home. The two of you would point at the sky as though you could sift through the constellations until the chill pressed roses into your cheeks, and when you looked at him you would see your earnestness mirrored. Now the skin underneath his eye is soft as clay.

There is a pause. Then, when he stands, you remain still. He walks around the desk and stops in front of you, arms crossed. You’ve an inch or two on him, you realize, but his shoulders are strong from holding up the weight of his pride.

“You remember Claude,” he says. You feel your lips peel apart, slightly, and a faint breath moves into the space between you and him.

You do remember Claude. But you remember Dimitri, too. You remember:

— walking shoulder-to-shoulder with him at the head of the column, the sun a deadly white. His face: sand-blasted, beaded, blood coursing close under his skin. Him catching your eye and saying in quiet, humourous despair, _By the Saints, it’s hot. How can you stand it?_ His smile, wry, and yours, barely suppressed. _I can’t. Why’d you volunteer us for this Saints’-forsaken excursion, you animal._ His laughter spilling onto the ground like pearls. _It needed to be done_ —

— looking at each other over the tops of Ingrid’s and Sylvain’s squabbling heads. Sylvain turning to you. _Well? What do you think?_ Looking down your nose at him and saying, point-blank: _I think you’re an idiot_ —

— Dimitri at the Winter Ball in Edelgard’s arms, bending down so she can whisper something into his ear, and laughing. Mercedes approaching you where you stand in the shadows. Watching them together, quietly, Mercedes’s hands clasped in front of her. The knowing glint in her eye when she turns to you. Her saying: _I don’t suppose this means you’ve estranged yourself for the evening?_ Snorting, and taking her extended hand —

— Dimitri, winning first place in the spear-throwing competition at the athletics festival. His laughter a song —

— lining the upper curve of his ear, from behind, with your eyes, as Edelgard stands in front of you both and tells Dimitri that he is kind in a way that is obviously enough a read that Dimitri’s shoulders stiffen. _And what will you do_ , she asks, _when you are forced to bear arms against your classmates? Against me?_ Dimitri’s reply: _Edelgard, you’re my friend_. Watching Edelgard, her eyes drowning, and knowing, as Dimitri did not —

— watching Dimitri break his fast with Ashe and Annette, the two of them tag-teaming what is undoubtedly a tale of epic proportions, if epic is a scale measured in gesticulations. Dedue, appearing beside you, his voice the warning rumble of a volcano, of the slow-moving magma beneath: _Your gaze is arrogant_ —

— sleeping against a tree while he reads, the light sieved through green leaves and swaying back and forth across you both —

— Dimitri, looking at you seriously. _I don’t understand. You will spar with everyone but me_. His frown. A blasphemy: he thinks he’s unworthy of you. Saying _No point_ and being unable to put this into words: that you fight to learn, and to become stronger, and to become stronger by learning. That you fight to defeat your enemies; you train to be able to defeat your enemies, and you’re not — ideal enough a man to have never considered that your peers are classmates today and can be — will be — enemies tomorrow. That there is only one person you will never bear arms against. _Don’t worry your pretty little head about it_ —

— Ingrid saying: _Come with us_. Dimitri, his smile above her head a wordless question. Somewhere: Dedue striking a hammer upon steel upon an anvil. _Not today. Things to do_. Sylvain’s pout. _You never want to have tea with us anymore_ —

— _Down, boy_. Claude, infuriatingly cheeky for someone at the levelled end of your blade, grinning with his hands up. Yourself, likewise, at the levelled end of his gaze. The gears turning behind his eyes. _Our favourite little lion sure is lucky to have you, isn’t he?_ —

— Dimitri, bent over, shoveling breath from his lungs like coal into a hungry furnace, a pebble of sweat hanging from his chin’s tip, a dewed leaf. The steel glinting in his hand and in his eyes when he unravels to full height. Dedue, nodding —

— finding him in an empty classroom, back to you, a silhouette against the window, staring out at the hills which roll toward the north, on the day before that which abruptly, tragically becomes your graduation day. A lion surveying all the places upon which the sun touches down. Him, turning around, and making you feel something so unworthy a focus for his gaze: his eyes boring into you as though from miles and miles away, the way an eagle must see, even though he’s standing right in front of you. From the door: _You all right?_ His tired smile. _Never better_ —

— finding him on a balcony, that night of the Winter Ball, after the dancing, and being still when he says, _What does your hair look like when it’s down?_ Saying, in reply: _You saw it down when we were kids_ , and being stunned into silence when he replies, _But not as I am now, and as you are. Not as men_. His hand, flared shyly and hovering above the side of your face like a fan of petals, the snowflakes falling onto and quickly melting on his cheeks, his eyelashes, the tip of his nose, bitten pink by the cold. One side of his face is yellow from the lights of the party, the other side blue from the moon. _May I?_ —

“Of course,” you say softly.

“And that’s why you came here,” he concludes. One of his hands lifts up, dove-like, and alights onto your shoulder. He squeezes, once. “You worry too much, Felix.”

Your eyes flick off to the side, and then back to him.

He breathes a laugh through his nose. One corner of his lip turns up and you feel a thrill at this newfound, earth-beaten dryness. He continues, “But that’s the thing about making mistakes.” His eyepatch swallows the torchlight and becomes a black spot, a mar, in this portrait of burnished, burning gold. “We learn.”

_Of course_.

You lower your eyes. “What are your orders?”

You tell yourself you’re only imagining, in his silence, the moment when he hardens, crystallizes, into myriad points like the tips of a thousand spears. His hand leaves your shoulders. His presence moves away, past you.

“I’ve sent for the cavalry. We’ve another front moving in from Ailell.”

Your eyes jump up. Two fronts and a cavalry. “Dimitri —” and then you stop.

You feel the pause more than you hear it. Then, like feathers: “Kill every last one of them.”

The tent flaps flare, a beating of wings — _excelsior_ — and then he is gone. You are left behind.


End file.
